Owen, Tarlos Endings and ABC Spinoff Plans

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers from Monday’s series finale of Fox’s “9-1-1: Lone Star,” titled “Homecoming.”

After five seasons of life-saving, it’s time to thank the 126 for their service and say goodbye to “9-1-1: Lone Star.” On the series finale episode of the Ryan Murphy-created Fox first-responder drama, a spinoff of the series “9-1-1” (which now airs on ABC), Owen Strand (Rob Lowe) saves the day — and all of Austin, Texas — by deactivating a nuclear reactor that’s been set off by an asteroid collision.

It’s the big bang ending that “9-1-1” franchise fans expected from a show that prides itself on its increasingly wild emergencies, and a heart-wrenching one until it’s final moments. Following a brief fake-out, it’s revealed Owen survived his injuries sustained during the emergency, and has left the 126 to return to New York. The station mourns the loss — but not loss of life — of its former captain as the title passes on to Judd (Jim Parrack). Owen’s son, T.K. (Ronen Rubinstein), and his husband Carlos (Rafael Silva) show up to honor the transition, even though T.K. has now retired from the job to raise Jonah, his little-brother-turned-adopted son with Carlos.

It’s a bittersweet ending that Lowe was proud to follow through on, after all the work Owen put in to save the 126 after the deaths of so many of its original squad members, which followed his own struggles after losing his team in the 9/11 attacks.

“He had completed his mission, his mission of the show, the conceit of the show, and from the very first moment of the pilot, which was: rebuild his family, rescue his son and then rebuild the shattered family of the 126 in Austin,” Lowe told Variety. “And he leaves the 126 in Austin completely rebuilt, completely functional, a great family — and same for his son. And now it’s time for for Owen to go off into, because he’s going East, the sunrise, not the sunset, and build the next chapter of his life.”

Meanwhile, T.K. has chosen his own path by leaving his boss Tommy (Gina Torres), who has recovered from cancer (after seeming very unwell in the previous episode!), and the other EMTs at the 126 for the stay-at-home dad/”Papa Bro” role in his new life with Carlos and Jonah.

“Once we introduced Jonah, you felt like this might be where the direction for Tarlos goes,” Rubinstein said of where we leave the fan-favorite couple made up of T.K. and Carlos. “For me, personally, it’s extra surreal. The show seems to really imitate life, imitating art for me very often for all my big life moments. And as we were filming Season 5, I had a baby on the way, and I have a son now, who just turned four months old. And knowing that the direction of the season would be me having a son on the show, it’s so bizarre.

“I think it’s a really cathartic, beautiful full circle of how I wished we would end the show for these two. And for T.K., it truly is a happily ever after for them, and a beautiful way to leave these characters.”

With “9-1-1” still going strong on its new network ABC — and “Lone Star” being canceled at Fox primarily due to complications surrounding Disney’s ownership of the franchise’s studio, 20th Television, not its lack of popularity — Lowe, Rubinstein and Silva have all expressed interest in reprising their roles either on the Los Angeles-set “9-1-1” or the upcoming spinoff in the works at ABC.

“I never say never to anything,” Lowe said. “I learned that a long time ago. It’s always a function of, what’s the story, what’s the script, who’s doing it, how good is the show? Is it a cheaper, wannabe version, or is it going to continue to have the kind of production value hallmarks that we’re really proud of, that we did on our show?

“Who knows?,” Lowe concluded. “We’ll have to see what everything looks like.”

Rubinstein says it “would be kind of impossible to say no,” and Silva thinks there’s still “so much beautiful opportunity to build the world” for their characters. So count them in.

Here, “Lone Star” showrunner Rashad Raisani talks with Variety about how he crafted the finale with co-creator Tim Minear so that these characters could return within the “9-1-1” universe (Raisani is a writer and producer on the “9-1-1” mothership as well) and what it took to pull of that big-budget final emergency.

There are a few minutes of the finale devoted to featuring Verizon’s THOR (Tactical Humanitarian Operations Response) trucks. How did this prominent product placement come about in the “9-1-1: Lone Star” series finale?

It’s funny, when you’re trying to do things as ambitiously as we were, you’re always right on the line of your financial ability to do them. And so anytime there’s something that could give you a boost, that could make something be more awesome, I’m in favor. And it just so happened that Verizon was offering this piece of technology that just kismet, the universe, God put it in the path. It’s the perfect thing that fits what we we’re going to do, which is the stars are falling and they knock out cell towers, and what if there’s a huge emergency that nobody can reach help for?

Yes, it was at the end of the day, about the cold, hard cash — but I’ve been a part of many product placement things over the many years of my career and this one, to me, felt the best of any I’ve ever done. Because what’s cool is, minus a beauty shot or two, this is what would really happen. Like when the fires hit L.A., they really did deploy the THORs. It’s actually a life-saving thing. So that made me feel OK about it, and frankly, to feel grateful about it to Verizon for helping us both on screen with their technology and the stuff that really does amazing work, and also financially, to let us tell a cooler finale, because we had some of the resources to do that. They saved the day, and our budget.

You faked us out for a minute, but Owen didn’t die, Tommy didn’t die — no one died in the finale. Why did you make that choice?

Part of it, ironically, was that I had decided that I didn’t want to kill anybody in the series finale, because I just felt like I wanted to end this show with a feeling of hope going out of it, and that life goes on in a beautiful way. Because the world’s hard enough and us getting canceled, just as we were kind of hitting our prime, it was so painful that we just felt like, “Well, ending it is going to be hard enough, so let’s end with hope.” And then I thought, “Well, if that’s the case, if we’re going to end with hope, then let’s make everybody suffer as much as possible until we get there.” Because that feeling of joy at the end, it’ll take you a second to go, “Oh, this is beautiful!” I really wanted that, and it is how we felt when we were breaking it. Hopefully, this feeling that we emit to the audience is the same thing we’re having, which is that, if we can do these scenes the right way — he is gone, that is sad that he left. But for these characters, they’re having real conversations when they talk about him being gone, and, of course, we reveal to the audience that he’s been alive the whole time. He’s just here in a very different capacity than he was for most of our series.

Will you bring these characters back either on “9-1-1” or the new spinoff set up at ABC?

I would hope so. I hope that that does happen. I certainly wouldn’t say no to it. That’s one of the beautiful things about all of them being alive, is that, who knows? Maybe either they’ll come to L.A. or wherever this next thing is set, or somebody from those shows will end up down in Texas, and we can have a couple of our characters representing the 126.

I would love it. I love working with every single one of them. I thought they were all beautifully talented, and I felt like we had more stories to tell for all of them. So it would delight me.

This interview has been edited and condensed.